We have lunch in an abandoned restaurant. Tables of black wood with matching chairs, we eat mushrooms with berries and drink pond water. We use napkins and a tablecloth of moss. When we finish, a bird screeches, and I’m alone. The moon glows, hanging from our ceiling, surrounded by stars: a celestial chandelier. I walk off. The restaurant transforms into […]
There’s a summer camp where I’ve spent a whole life of which I have no recollection. We drive past it and I notice a police car. Mum pulls in, to try and see whats going on, for I was set to spend another summer of vacant memories. Half of the camp structures are closed off. We ask the officers what’s […]
‘You should be dead.’ I know because I was the last person to leave your funeral. I was the one you last spoke to. I was the one who killed you with that stone. *** Do you know how hard it is to be a twin? You share everything with them: Everything you own, for everything is hers, your identity, […]
There was someone in my life once who gave me a bouquet of sunflowers, and I took care of them day and night. They were their favourite flowers, so much that they had a dried one stitched onto their hand, its petals weaved into their veins and the stem tied around their wrist, their own version of a lucky charm, […]
There’s an annual gameshow where I’m from: temporary monarchs, where the winners get to rule our nation for one year. Once their time is up, they can sign up to play and try winning again. Dear mirror and reflection, why am I telling you this? You live here, I’m sure you know how it works. You’ve lived here forever, and […]
The Odyssey and The Iliad are two of the oldest pieces of surviving literature in the modern world. They were originally written around the 9th or 8th century BCE by Homer, and since then they have been translated into countless languages, including English, numerous times, with each editor and translator leaving their own interpretation of these epic tales. These classics […]
Focusing on ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. ‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.’[1] There is no doubt of death being the main theme of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The tolling of a bell is immediately mentioned, which, in Gray’s time, ‘accumulated almost inescapable associations with the passing bell.’[2] Gray explores the theme of death […]
‘What do we need again?’ I grabbed a shopping basket and tried to visualise the list I had made that was now probably at the bottom of my bag, under a pile of receipts, gum wrappers, and who knows what else. There was no point in even trying to get it out of there. Nothing. Not a single item on […]
“The next person that says something about my sister is going to lose his head, and I mean it. The Mother said that it’s my turn to pick the next victim anyway.” I said as I polished my ceremonial knives and showed them to Her. “First of all, they’re not victims.” She says, reprimanding me as always. “Sure, it is […]
Boxes of bones and cartilage holding everything I have ever owned. They’re never emptied, and my belongings have now calcified. Yet I spend my nights looking through them, at everything that helped shape me. But before I can dismember it and dig one of my many hearts out, someone calls my name and I snap back to reality. I have […]